Chronicle recommends: No on S.F. Prop. B

San Francisco Chronicle

April 20, 2016Updated: April 20, 2016 7:27pm

Photo: Michael Macor, The Chronicle

Dolores Park

Dolores Park

Back in 2008, San Francisco voters overwhelmingly approved a wise but nonbinding fiscal policy: Future ballot measures should not be allowed to lock in funding for a particular program unless they included a revenue source, limited annual increases to no more than 2 percent and did not extend more than 10 years.

Now comes a big test of whether city voters will follow their sound advice.

Proposition B is the type of feel-good issue that might tempt voters to break that pledge of fiscal responsibility. It would guarantee that the Recreation and Park Department general fund budget, now at $64 million a year, would grow by $3 million annually for the next decade — and keep pace with the city’s growth in discretionary revenues for 20 years beyond that. It also would extend a voter-approved set-aside from property taxes for parks, recreation and open space (2½ cents for every $100 of assessed valuation) for an additional 15 years.

“It would have a significant impact on the cost of government,” city Controller Ben Rosenfield wrote in his analysis.

We readily acknowledge all the proponents’ arguments for the city to make robust, consistent investments in parks. They enhance our quality of life, they advance public health and safety and they are only going to become more essential to city life as population increases.

“They’re not just sweet amenities,” said Phil Ginsburg, general manager of Recreation and Park.

We empathize with Ginsburg’s frustration that he had to make budget cuts during the depths of the Great Recession, and that his budget generally has not kept pace with the growth in city revenues.

Still, there is something very wrong with putting such budget guarantees in the city charter for 30 years without a defined revenue source — as if those annual increases would drift like magic from the heavens. It’s flatly disingenuous for those glossy Prop. B mailers to assure voters in underlined letters that the parks funding would come “without raising taxes.” They should have added the clause: “we hope.”

The fact is, the money will need to come from somewhere. It takes a huge leap of faith to assume that the next decade, let alone the next 30 years, will not present the city with a crisis that will require spending cutbacks or diversions to urgent priorities.

If such a predicament arises — whether from an economic downturn, natural disaster, health crisis or terrorism or lord-knows-what else — the Recreation and Park budget would remain sacrosanct.

It’s easy to decide in a vacuum that parks and recreation deserve more money. They do. But public policy involves choices — and sometimes those choices require difficult, even excruciating, decisions to meet the challenges of the times. Voter mandates already account for $1.5 billion of San Francisco’s $4.6 billion general fund.

Don’t further tie the hands of our elected officials for the next 30 years.